The external ornamentation of a structure such as a house or a building is well known in the industry especially for the purposes of holiday lighting and/or advertising indicia. Initially strings of incandescent lights were used that required no more than simple hooks to mount them to a structure. The next evolution of exterior structure lighting employed series of light emitting diodes (LEDs) and their supporting electrical conductors enveloped within a flexible, translucent plastic tube which were to become known as a rope lights. These early rope lights were produced in lengths limited to the manufacturing limitations of the external tube and the process for drawing the LED arrays into the tube.
The current state of the art in rope lights utilizes LEDs and their conductors extruded within a continuous medium of flexible, translucent plastic. Enveloping the lights and conductors within the plastic medium guaranteed efficient orientation of the LEDs for best light output and protected the lights and conductors from the effects of weather. This extruded configuration increased the practical length of the rope light greatly as the power utilization of the LEDs became the new limiting factor. Since the nature of LEDs is power efficiency, the maximum length of the rope light has increased dramatically. A new limiting factor introduced with the extruded rope light is the amount the rope light can bend before stressing or breaking the internal components in the extrusion.
When mounting a rope light to a structure it is advantageous to have as few breaks between continuous lengths of rope lights to minimize the possibility of breaks and exposure of the rope light circuitry. Systems of mounting modules have been created to conform a rope light to the external topography of structures but when encountering a significant angular redirection most systems require a junction module that necessitates a break in the rope light. This is most obvious when it comes to interior corners as most mounting systems are designed to be in direct contact with the surface of the structure.
Therefore what is needed is a mounting device that would function as module in a structural rope light mounting system, for a continuous rope light that can extend over an interior corner of a pair of adjoining surfaces without requiring a break in the rope light. The device should; aesthetically match with the other modules in the system, retain the rope light at a flexure curve that will not stress the rope light's internal components, be easily installable and able to be efficiently mass produced.